The Future of PBS NOW = A Special Message

[L. Coyote]

From:
"NOW Update"


The Future of NOW = A Special Message for You from John Siceloff, Executive Producer, NOW on PBS


Good news and bad news.

This moment, this time, is an inflection point in American history -- at least it seems that way from my perch as executive producer of NOW. In the last year we've witnessed an extraordinary election and now an extraordinary recession. We want to continue our reporting on these and other urgent issues for America and the world, and for that we need your help.

But first the good news. We were just notified that NOW on PBS won the top award for political journalism on television, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, given by the Annenberg Center at USC. We tied with "This Week with George Stephanopoulos", and beat every other news show on every network and every cable channel.

And that's not all. The polling company Erdos and Morgan found that opinion leaders consider NOW on PBS to be the "most credible" weekly television news show on television. Again, we beat every other weekly show on network and cable.

These awards honor our tough investigative reporting. Our production teams go on location and follow the facts where they lead us. Since NOW's launch we've reported in all 50 states and 17 countries. Tom Brokaw sums it up: NOW is "fearless about challenging conventional wisdom."

Now for the bad news. We're a million dollars short for 2009. PBS has maintained its generous support, but many of the philanthropies who support NOW have had to make severe cuts in their grants to the show, due to plummeting endowments.

Every member of the staff, including me, will take an unpaid eight-week furlough this year. In that way, we avoid losing our most important resource: our journalists. No one will be laid off.

But we still face a shortfall in the resources we need for robust reporting and investigating. For our ground-breaking piece about the causes of the financial meltdown, "Credit and Credibility", we worked for months to get whistleblowers inside the ratings agencies to talk to us. We're about to air another piece in our beat about the state of the economy that we call "Out of the Woods -- Rebuilding after the Great Collapse". Our coverage of the economic crisis, based on real reporting which doesn't simply put talking heads in a studio, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I know that these difficult times have affected all of you. Please continue to support your local PBS affiliate--the stations are in economic pain as well. And as a NOW viewer and web user, you may also choose to give directly to NOW on PBS--if so, please email Mimi Evans at [e-mail] for more information. Your contributions will go directly to support our reporting.

Please forward this letter to friends and colleagues.

http://www.pbs.org/now/thisweek/archive.html

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